Yep. Like I've said in the past, 24-hour earnings with PPLNS is time-delayed ~6 hours due to the mature time on PPLNS. Actually, it's closer to a 10-hour delay now that ASICMINER is moving more into solo mining. Still very short (shorter than any other PPLNS pool I think). Luck did bounce back fairly well, though we're still going to need more of this type of luck to make up for the negative trend the pool has been on.

Very likely going to get into merged mining testing next weekend. If I can figure out a good way to implement it in the pool software, I will probably go with multiple altcoins similar to what bitparking does. Hopefully that will keep people excited even when luck is sour.

I am just curious, why is the overall pool speed dropping from 37,000 GH/s to 30,000 GH/s within a few days?

Is that due to people leave pools and mine solo with asics for example?

The drop is entirely ASICMINER. As of this post, we are at 31,600 GH/s, with ASICMINER at 7,600 GH/s. Our peak speed was roughly 39,000 GH/s, with ASICMINER at 14,500 GH/s. So ASICMINER is down 7,000 GH/s, and the pool is down ~7,000 GH/s from peak speed.

Under normal circumstances.. what is the avg variance when using PPLNS to the theoretical value.?An estimated ball park figure will do.!

I can't say for sure. Normally PPLNS should not be vastly different, but in a 24-hour window many things can happen. As I've stated earlier, we have had two extremes in the last month. One day where PPS was earning roughly 60% of what you'd get at neutral luck (so -40%), and another day where you were getting roughly 50% more than what you'd get at neutral luck. Both of those are quite rare occurrences, and daily variance should *normally* be much lower, but I'm not confident enough to give a hard percentage for "average" 24-hour variance.

Pool servers are being restarted due to a problem with the database server. While I could have left the pool servers online, I felt safer letting miners hit backup pools rather than potentially lose share submissions.

UPDATE: Pool servers are back online. Sorry for the inconvenience. Worker speeds will be slightly inaccurate for a few more minutes.

Three was a bug in PPLNS earnings calculations earlier. I'm looking into it now to determine how much has been overpaid and whether or not it is enough that it requires correction. Site temporarily unavailable while this is going on (shouldn't be more than 10 minutes).

UPDATE: PPLNS shifts 6393 - 6403 had received multiple payouts from the same block(s) last night due to some problem with database load. Some shifts received roughly double what they should have. Since this affected so many shifts, the amount of coins being overpaid was too high to ignore. The shifts rewards have been corrected, with ~1 BTC extra thrown in across the shifts to round up the rewards. Some accounts may show a negative balance if they requested payouts that were only possible due to the excess rewards. As usual, you can either mine back the difference (you were paid more than you should have been owed), or make a new account.

After seeing this bug, I'm now adding a new sanity check to the PPLNS reward allocation script to make sure it does not repeat itself in the future.

That explains why I saw a -0.005 balance on my account, did a manual payment this morning and now I owe $0.60 to the pool At my current speed, it would roughtly take ~3 hours to get back to zero balance.

That explains why I saw a -0.005 balance on my account, did a manual payment this morning and now I owe $0.60 to the pool At my current speed, it would roughtly take ~3 hours to get back to zero balance.

Luckily the duration of this double awarding was not very long (~8 hours). As a result, even the most harshly affected (payout requested JUST before it was caught) shouldn't require more than half a day to rebuild their balance.

That explains why I saw a -0.005 balance on my account, did a manual payment this morning and now I owe $0.60 to the pool At my current speed, it would roughtly take ~3 hours to get back to zero balance.

Luckily the duration of this double awarding was not very long (~8 hours). As a result, even the most harshly affected (payout requested JUST before it was caught) shouldn't require more than half a day to rebuild their balance.

I'm sure you don't get this nearly often enough.

Thank you for being open with whats going on, your status updates are always welcome and helpful. Thank you for running a very stable pool. Thank you for being an honest operator.

In short, thank you for everything that you do. I know you make good money at it but you deserve it.

Thank you for being open with whats going on, your status updates are always welcome and helpful. Thank you for running a very stable pool. Thank you for being an honest operator.

In short, thank you for everything that you do. I know you make good money at it but you deserve it.

Thank you . I've been lucky recently that the pool has been very stable, so while you don't see many positive comments, the pool thread has not had many negative comments either [aside from the luck based posts].

I've also updated the News section on the website to give a little more detail on what occurred. It isn't significantly more than what was on the forum, but it is more than originally showed up on the news section.

Every time I request a payout I get this: You do not have a valid wallet address associated with your account. Also, when I try to update auto pay I get this: There was an error updating the database. Please try again after a few seconds. Still no payout, what is wrong with btcguild? I have stopped mining, I hope this problem can be fixed.

Every time I request a payout I get this: You do not have a valid wallet address associated with your account. Also, when I try to update auto pay I get this: There was an error updating the database. Please try again after a few seconds. Still no payout, what is wrong with btcguild?

I responded in your mining support thread (stumbled upon it yesterday). Your account (assuming its the same as your forum name) has never set a wallet address to send funds to. Go to your settings page to set one.

The automatic payout warning is likely because you're trying to use a value that rounds down to 0 (you have to use multiples of 0.01, it will floor the value to the nearest 0.01 if it contains extra decimals). Since you're already set at 0 by default, the server doesn't see anything change in the database, thus there was an error updating it.

To avoid confusion: I've been changing how many shifts are used in the average displayed on the PPLNS Stats page. This stat used to be 100 shifts, which was approximately 48-50 hours worth of time. With the increase to shift sizes to reduce per-shift variance, and ASICMINER moving ~50% of their hashpower to solo mining, this was ending up closer to 96 hours. Currently it is at 50 shifts, which is roughly 2 days.

Later this evening it will be adjusted to show approximate 24, 48, and 96 hour averages. Please note that the averages will tend to be much higher than PPS Rates after a difficulty change since they are mixing the current difficulty and previous difficulty. As usual when looking at past reward averages: Past results are not an indicator of future performance.